Funeral Eulogy: Post-mortem figures and Redeemed Bodies, in Images

The essay explores the relationship between dead bodies, statues and photographs, individuating in the images not only a means for petrifying bodies, embalming them in time—as argued by Barthes, Debray and Dubois—but also a form of re-animation of the inanimate. A sort of living relic, the image is the frozen testimony of a fleeting vitality, a paradoxical form of ‘visible hiding’ in which life and death are intertwined. The essay demonstrates this process in some contemporary works, moving from The Hidden Mother (L. Fregni Nagler, 2013), a series of portraits of babies from the late nineteenth century. In these bodies of babies still alive, but in which lives their very same corpse, death is a phantom but also a tangible fear behind the photographic gesture.